There is a particularly sharp kind of sorrow that comes when a disease we thought we had defeated reappears in the places we thought safest. Pennsylvania has just been forced to confront that sorrow. For the first time in decades, the Commonwealth is mourning measles deaths. Not in an old photograph, not in a history textbook, but in real time, in real families, in hospital rooms with frantic nurses and grieving parents. The news arrived like a bombshell over the state, turning quiet conversations at pharmacy counters and school pickup lines into anxious debates. Mothers who had never seen a…

“I’m starting to look forward to these chats—they’re a nice routine. We’ll create some memories yet.”